


adventures in solitude

by thisstableground



Series: less than ninety degrees [10]
Category: Do No Harm (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Flashbacks, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-03 15:46:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21181949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisstableground/pseuds/thisstableground
Summary: Ruben’s in a relationship and couldn’t be happier about that, but it doesn’t mean he can just forget what happened to him before he came here.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter one: An old intrusive memory.  
Chapter two: He’s still trying to work out how much of this - any of this, good or bad - he deserved.  
Chapter three: Dr Ruben Marcado, Actual Science Genius, reclaiming something should have been his all along.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for this chapter: slight discussion of violence, dealing with suicidal impulses (they're fleeting and mostly in the past)

There are ghosts tangible and ghosts intangible.

Sometimes it’s easier when it’s Ian. Ian was uncomplicated, even if what came after is a mess that Ruben’s forever untangling. Ian didn’t have the patience for manipulation without violence, only half-heartedly committing to anything more long game before devolving into the physical. Quicker to just pick someone up and throw them where you want them than tricking them into it. Things unabstracted like Ian letting his gaze wander slow down Ruben’s body and saying “did you _really_ think I wouldn’t be able to find you?” No subtlety to let symbolism go by unexplained, Ian. Probably talks the whole way through movies to make sure you know how clever he is for spotting the plot twists, assuming he doesn’t strangle you for getting the wrong kind of popcorn first.

Ruben isn’t saying it’s easy in a sort of large-scale sense of things that a person can think about, _make coffee, put on pants, remember the guy who tortured you, eat breakfast_ kind of way, though sometimes it slips into a kind of horrifying mundanity because he’s so used to it. What he means is, it’s just really hard to categorize it as anything other than it was, and Ruben functions better with a well-organised internal referencing system.

Jason was more difficult for a while, when the initial sense of permanent danger was soothed and Ruben had to deal with other mental ravines that needed filling, or at the very least a safety railing so he’d stop falling down them. Jason’s still more difficult, a lot of the time. He didn’t go into any of this with the express purpose of hurting Ruben but he did anyway and didn’t care enough to stop, and from the very start Ruben had been operating at confusing cross-purposes, entirely aware that he was being used but still so convinced they were friends, for reasons that were as incomprehensible then as they are now. Naivety, maybe. Or desperation. Not an evil guy, Ruben doesn’t think, because evil implies awareness, but just as dangerous, just as haunting.

But that stuff gets easier too when there’s things that can be used as comparison, knowing what friends actually are. Not just Usnavi with his straightforward sweetness and Vanessa fierce and protective, but maybe eventually Sonny, who inherited Usnavi’s ability to take a monologue and run halfway round the world with it and so isn’t particularly put off on the many occasions Ruben doesn’t have anything to say in return. Maybe eventually Nina, who he’s only known outside of anecdotes for a month so he’s still trying to work her out, but there’s a passion that seems to translate across the gap between his science and her literature to a surprising amount of common ground, and she has a suspiciously delicate approach to his boundaries that he's been meaning to ask her about. People who don’t mind that he’s less comfortable with them and less confident with them, that he’s still only just learning to seek them out of his own accord, because turns out friendship doesn’t have to mean being everything to someone all the time with no problems. He can be bad at this and still succeed slowly, not everything has to be innate. Takes some of the pressure off.

So Jason and Ian things can be quantified and combated in the real world. Waking up in the middle of the night to frantically pull a drawer open and find something to cover up with, that’s empirical: he can’t be back there because he’s here, and he can’t be seen because he can feel that he is covered. The scars are ugly but almost a comfort sometimes: he didn’t make it up. It happened, it was real, and then it healed. Messily, yes, not traceless, but the body tries its best, the mind tries its best, Ruben tries his best.

It isn’t an ideal system. Concrete realities can filter through the wrong perspective: he remembers painfully the aftermath of the time he was lost so sudden and deep in a flashback that he called Usnavi ‘Ian’, though he doesn’t remember the specifics of the incident that caused it. The senses can be tricked. Even then there’s ways to come back, neutral sense data like the texture of fabrics, the sound of voices that have always been safe and familiar smells of coffee or perfume, and when his sight finally comes back to the right part of the timeline, a heartbreak on their faces that Jason never would have cared enough to wear. Ruben counts evidence till he claws his way out of the past and he doesn’t dare think too far into the future but the present is good for now.

He loses memories and gains false ones. The nightmares where it’s not him on the table this time, and he’s a frozen spectator while Vanessa or Usnavi scream for him to help them feel as real as what actually happened, which now only comes to him in fragments. At first he couldn’t forget a second of it, not for months, and then when he started to lose pieces he picked at it like reopening a healing wound because something like that shouldn’t be forgotten, surely? It had been everything for so long. The idea of creating new clean spaces inside of him was almost as terrifying as the idea of feeling like this forever. But eventually he wanted so badly to be better, and he let his brain let go of the pieces that it hurt too much to hold onto, though he knows they’re still there buried.

There are things which it’s harder to put a box around and designate _not real any more. _Like today when he thinks he feels fine and he’s cleaning his apartment and humming out of tune to himself while he picks up a cloth and some Windex and a version of his own voice in his head that he hasn’t heard for almost a year says _drink it. _

He drops the bottle.

_Drink it, make it stop, I want it to stop, drink it._

“Um, no?” he says out loud, too confused to be freaked out.

Ghosts intangible: nothing can be trusted completely, not even your own thoughts. Just when Ruben thinks he’s struck up a deal with himself and might have a grasp on whatever’s whirring away up there, just when Ruben has a new job that he's enjoying and a life that's all his own and a _relationship, _just as he's beginning to wonder if happiness could mean more than just the absence of unhappiness for him, it goes and does things like this. It’s hard to sort into his databases. _Be kind to yourself_ keeps warring with _you would’ve done to yourself exactly what Ian threatened to do to you, so how are you better than him_? How can he tell himself the threat isn’t real when the threat is _him_? Ruben hates that it can make him pity Jason for this, living with another voice in his head and no way to chase it out.

He hasn’t told anyone, not even his old therapist, how much he wanted to hurt himself, he hasn’t told them how much he wanted to hurt Ian. Keeps secret the contents of the cruel whispers in his head of all the terrible things Ruben deserves to feel, words that came from nobody but himself. Keeps secret how vivid he can dream blood that isn't his. Ruben can be dangerous, Ruben can be poisonous, Ruben knows the dark things in the world. People think that he is kind. He wants them to be right. These floodgates can't be opened.

And would telling anyone even help? He doesn't really want to die, doesn't need to any more. It’s just the words that have come back. And they’ve lost their teeth, too, the old arguments wouldn’t be compelling this time. Nobody would have missed him when they all thought he was dead already, but they’d miss him now. It would have hurt less than living then. Sometimes a full day can go by where Ruben hardly hurts at all now. Sometimes he even forgets.

Lose memories, gain memories, Ruben’s temporally displaced. He forgets it ever happened then he forgets that the years in between happened too. He feels fine, is the thing, the voice only an echo like so many things are echoes, negative thought by default. The last couple of months have been strange and this is just older lifelong synapses firing off in a panic at the idea of change, even change for the good.

_Drink it drink it drink it._

_“_No,” he says, out loud again. As much of a fragile thing as he thinks he might come across sometimes, Ruben is tougher than he looks. This isn’t going to send him spiralling. He exhales the tension, trusts that his heartrate will re-regulate back to normal in time, and picks up the dropped bottle of Windex.

Once his cleaning supplies are safely hidden away, Ruben takes his journal, an actual journal that he started keeping on the recommendation of his therapist, not just a notebook full of formulas and half-finished epiphanies. Writes _thought about doing something stupid_, draws a box round it. Rethinks, crosses it out, writes_ passing suicidal impulses_, which is more clinical and also more honest. It makes his stomach hurt, but he can’t fight something if he doesn’t dare name it.

He writes today’s date underneath and then draws a box round the new words, doesn’t dwell on it for now, doesn't go back to cleaning. He spends the afternoon with his plants instead, cooing tender, quiet songs at their leaves as encouragement, which is something he will never, ever admit to anyone he actually does. He flips to a clean new page in his journal and makes detailed notes on all their progress. They’re growing well.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: PTSD discussion, and self-blame from Ruben as an abuse survivor.

Ruben’s pretty sure his parameters of normal life experiences are so far skewed that they're practically lemniscate, because sometimes he says things like _and then he tried to kill me _and it comes out sounding basically like _and then I went to the store, _and the breeziness of it always seems to upset Usnavi and make Vanessa purse her lips unhappily.

It’s not that it doesn’t bother him too, kinda, but he doesn’t know how to explain it to them that this is how it works: there’s a set of scales that he’s weighed things up against. So he almost got offed a few times, and no, he wasn’t a fan. But, they so nearly lost that patient when Jason asked him to help fake his death, and Ruben nearly killed Jason when Ian told him to. He hadn’t been happy about either instanc, but that hadn’t stopped him doing it. Oz’s bouncers with the guns, Ian with the baseball bat, some things were debts that paid themselves back.   
  
There’s a set of scales and it went both ways: there was the dialysis machine, but Ruben had Ian at his mercy less than an hour later and pushing that button was like the electricity was flowing from his own fingers, godlike_. I can get even with you, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me right now_.

Jamaica threw the equilibrium off. That was too much, even for Ruben’s sins. The part of him that can’t stop trying to balance every equation wonders if Usnavi and Vanessa are the universe’s way of resetting things after that, because every day they’re more than he ever hoped he could have.

Now that’s something he won’t ever say to them. If it was the other way round, one or both of them stood in front of him, scattered with scars and saying _it was what had to happen for me to find you_…it isn’t much of a compliment. He adores them both, but he’d give them up in a second to spare them that kind of hurt.

Besides, he doesn’t really believe it anyway. For all his brain tries to keep the scales level, _everything happens for a reason_ is a suffocating thought. Ruben prefers to think that life is just a cycle of external events and internal decisions: things just happen, and you make choices about what to do next. A burden, for a while - if he hadn’t had that desktop background, if he hadn’t let slip that he knew about the transitions, all the maybes and what ifs. With time, it’s started to be a comfort: he’s had some bad judgement and some huge fuck ups, but at least it wasn’t destiny. Ruben can try to mess up less in future, he can’t fix fate.

Talking to them about Jamaica is still surreal. To stand there as a person and admit aloud that someone made him so much less than that once, an object to be acted upon. Saying it changes the abstract carvings along the lines of his limbs from indefinable images to a real thing that was done to _him_ while he lay blank and unmoving like a canvas slowly painted with unfurling lines of red.

It was wrong, that it happened. He can accept that. He can even accept Usnavi and Vanessa wanting to help him, though he doesn’t know why they do. It sometimes keeps him up all night, listening to their sleep breathing in stereo while he wonders what the fuck the catch is. Is it all gonna crash down around him? This luck can’t be permanent, but he doesn’t wanna let that thought ruin this: temporary or not, there’s something here he’s trying his best to hold onto.

Which is why, hard as it was to let the two of them in on anything at all, it’s completely unthinkable to tell them about some other stuff. For Ruben’s eyes only, forever. How could he say _he hurt me, and I liked it when I got to hurt him back_? Vanessa might talk some smack about punching Jason in the face, but it’s not exactly on the same level as administering involuntary electroshock in a dingy hospital basement, opponent tied down so he can’t get a hit of his own in. How could he ever look at them and say _I made a drug to kill a man and I don’t regret it at all_? They can’t know about that.

Also impossible is the idea of telling them the things he used to want, in case they misread, think that he asked for everything he ended up getting and are disgusted by him because Ruben’s life before them was the fuckin’ monkey paw: make a wish then watch it come true in the worst of ways.

Back at IMH Ruben used to take Jason’s blood to learn the secrets and the stories of his brain and body under a microscope, wishing that he could be something so brilliantly unique that someone - that Jason - would want to do the same to him in return. (But it was Ian who pushed the needle into Ruben’s arm, in the end, and the only story Jason read from off the wall wasn’t even about Ruben at all. Before he was the canvas he was the paint, but he never was the picture itself.)

Jason owned Ruben in actions, could ask him to help kill a patient and to keep his work a secret and to stay for eight hours more. What could Ruben say but _yes_, wishing it wouldn’t be pointless to add _you could own me again, any way you want to_. Pin him like a butterfly, held down and spread out, Ruben wouldn’t fight it. (Jason wouldn’t have taken what Ruben was so prepared to give even if he’d ever tried to offer. It was only ever Ian who pinned him to the wall, time and time again. He took nothing but the air from Ruben’s lungs with a choking pressure on his throat, and it’s not that Ruben _wouldn’t_ fight, only that he couldn’t.)  
  
He always desperately wished he could be something worthy, to examine or to touch or to take apart._ You gonna be good, Rubes_? Ian had asked in the warehouse, and what could Ruben say, _no_? He did everything he was told to. Ian saw him body and soul laid bare, ran soft hands across his chest like a lover, left him in pieces, and Ruben hadn’t wanted any of it.

Usnavi and Vanessa are good without even having to try. They were built the way they are now, flawed and still lovely. Whenever Usnavi and Vanessa take him apart it’s in the best way, with the careful hands of an expert dismantling a complex piece of machinery, knowing they've got the skill to put it back together better than it was before when they’re finished.

They think he was the victim, just an innocent caught in the crossfire. They’re wrong. There was nothing innocent about the way he felt for Jason. He was muddied and messed up from a lifetime of loneliness long before he started at the lab, and he still willingly threw himself into the dirt over and over.

There’s so many things he hasn’t told them yet, that he probably won’t tell them ever. It’s a lot to do with being selfish. He doesn’t want them to leave him when they find out he’s not coming to them with a clean soul. Or worse, they’ll offer comfort, tell him none of this was his fault either. Some things he hasn’t earned his absolution for. Some things he’s sure he deserved.

But it’s also because he’s been given a chance to do it right this time, shake a little of the dirt off even if there’s so much of it stamped in forever. He’s always wanted so much to be good enough, and he thinks for them he might be able to learn how. He thinks he’s learnt a lot already.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: brief implied discussion of sexual assault.

“I had a crush on him,” Ruben says out of nowhere, one evening when they’re all piled on Usnavi's couch watching TV. Usnavi mutes the television, and they all sit up a little straighter so they can see each others faces.  
  
“On who?”  
  
“Jason. I had the biggest, stupidest, most waste-of-my-time crush on him. For years, even when I tried not to.”  
  
“Ew, why?” asks Vanessa. “He sounds like the biggest douchebag on the planet even without all the shit he did to you.”  
  
There’s a tiny chance she’s biased, but probably she’s just objectively right about this.

“Yeah, well. He was a very _attractive_ douchebag,” Ruben answers. “And I was twenty-two and I’d never dated, and only a couple months in at my first real job with a real PhD here’s the bigtime chief of neurosurgery telling me he’d heard I was brilliant. My ego was into it. And there was the whole scientific anomaly thing, I never could resist an impossible equation.”  
  
“I always forget how young you were when this all started,” sighs Usnavi.

“I’m _still_ young.”

“…Did he know?” asks Usnavi, exchanging glances with Vanessa. Because honestly, every time they think they can’t hate Jason more something else seems to come up. If it turns out Jason knew barely-out-of-college, single, lonely Ruben had feelings for him and used that to make him do his dirty work then- well, Vanessa won’t be able to do anything about it, which she still fucking hates, but her and Usnavi will definitely find a private moment to share a bottle of wine and come up with creatively elaborate revenge ideas that they’ll never actually carry out.  
  
“No,” says Ruben. “Really don’t think he did. He was too oblivious to anything two foot in front of his own dumb symmetrical face to even realise other people existed. I’m pretty sure I could’ve given him a lapdance and he wouldn’t have even noticed I was _there_ unless I was holding a bottle of pills at the same time, never mind that I was into him.”

Vanessa fucking loves it when Ruben’s mad at people. Especially at this particular person, who continues to reaffirm his position as the worst piece of shit in the entire solar system with every word she hears about him. She kisses him, in the hopes that some positive reinforcement will encourage this kind of attitude more often, and Ruben smiles into it like he knows exactly what she’s about.

The smile drops and so does the irritated edge in his voice when he says, “Ian knew, though. Ian definitely knew.”

He had his sleeves still rolled up from washing dishes after dinner - he’s been getting more comfortable staying uncovered in their apartments, even when sex isn’t imminent - but as soon as he mentions Ian they get pulled down far enough to cover even the couple of scars that creep from his arm onto the backs of his hands. A little alarm bell memory of one detail Usnavi had told her about the warehouse - _he made him take his clothes off, Vanessa, he made him just fuckin' lie there waitin' to get hurt - _rings loudly and she feels sick with fear when she asks “Ruben, did he…he didn’t…?”  
  
“No,” says Ruben, thankfully catching her meaning so she doesn’t have to say it aloud. Even more thankfully, he doesn't sound like he’s lying. The way life seems to shit on him constantly, nothing would surprise Vanessa any more, but it’s a relief not to add _that_ to the list.

“Not that he's above it,” continues Ruben, trying to sound steady. “But, no. I might be overthinking, it’s just...the way he was, uh, during.” He indicates awkwardly at his arm. “Some of the things he said. And he was too nice to me, before, at least when he wasn't trying to kill me. The club that one time, he was so friendly. Took my hand after we jumped out the window, kept touching my shoulder or putting his hand on my chest. And I’m pretty sure it's not because he admired my rippling pecs or my dancing, y’know? He wanted me on side.”

Ruben takes his notebook off the coffee table so he can tear a blank page out. He screws it up into a ball, which he throws hard against the wall with an almost sulky look, grinding his teeth. It’s infinitely preferable when his memories come out in this mood, bitter rather than scared, but she doesn't like either of them on him. “Still nicer to me than Jason ever was, isn’t that fucked up? You spend five years creating a miracle drug for a guy that he won’t even let you make bank on, and it’s the murder half of his brain that buys you dinner. I should’ve taken the million dollars and never looked back.”

“A million?!” says Usnavi, incredulous. “You turned down a million dollars for him? Jesus, how symmetrical _was_ this guy’s face? Nobody’s _that_ pretty."  
  
“_You’re_ prettier than a million dollars,” Ruben tells him. “At least a whole extra K prettier.”  
  
Ruben's getting in a habit of goofing around whenever he’s telling them about this shit outside the context of a flashback: he doesn’t like it when the room gets too tense around him, finds it easier to get sentences out if they’re cushioned with some sarcasm. He’ll drop fragments of memories at random points in the most forcibly casual way. It makes it easier for all of them, really, to pretend like they’re discussing a bad day at work instead of what really happened. Even though the compliment was mostly to keep the mood light, Usnavi still pulls his hat down low to hide how pink he’s just turned.

“I guess you’re pretty too,” he mumbles and Ruben beams.

They’re so disgustingly sweet together, it makes Vanessa’s heart feel all fucked up. How did she end up with two such _saps_?

“Not to derail the circle-jerk of ego that is two guys with basically the same face callin' each other cute,” she says, before they try and drag her down with them. “But…Ruben. Tell me if I'm crossin' into uncomfortable territory here, but… couldn’t you still do that? Couldn’t you still sell it?”  
  
Ruben freezes.  
  
“Sorry,” she says. “Sorry, I know there’s a lot of shit tied up in all that, of course you don’t wanna -“

“No,” he says. “No, Vanessa, you’re fucking _right._ I didn’t even think about it. I stopped everything before it went to proper research trials because I wouldn’t sell him out, and the whole thing just never took off. Nobody except me ever worked on it, there weren’t any samples in the lab and I deleted all traces of it off the system so they couldn’t have done anything with it when I was dead -“ Usnavi and Vanessa both flinch at the phrasing. Ruben doesn’t notice, on a full-speed chase with this train of thought as he jumps up from the couch “- but I had some stuff on my home computer, and I kept hard copies of the most important things, nobody else knew about that. My mom saved all my research, she saved all my papers, it wouldn't be too hard to fill in the gaps anything that’s not there. It’s still mine. Blackout still belongs to _me_.”

This is the first time Vanessa’s ever seen Ruben take up space like this, his arms gesticulating, his pacing feet carrying him in a wide circle - he’s so into what he’s saying he doesn’t even notice when he bangs his leg into the coffee table. All the things they only ever see suppressed in glimpses or in the privacy of a bedroom are radiating: now _this_ is a look that suits him.

And then his face drops. “Oh. but…Jason. He was my trial subject, all the data is based on him. I can’t just give it all away.”

“But didn’t the whole Ian thing come out anyway, sort of?” asks Usnavi. “You said he had to tell when he finally got it treated, so its not like you’re revealin' nothin' other than the sciencey stuff.”

“Yeah. I mean, yeah, that’s true… but. I said wouldn’t say anything. I _said_ I wouldn’t.” Ruben looks small again, biting his lip and staring way too intently down at his own socks instead of looking at either of them.

Vanessa wonders if this is what it’d be like to watch his pre-Heights life in fast-forward, seeing that hyperactive flare of excitement about his work giving way to uncertainty and then fading into almost nothing like a doused fire. How does this guy still have such a hold on him? She can feel her fists clenching instinctively. “No, fuck that. Haven’t you given up enough for that bastard, Ruben? You don’t owe him shit. Especially not five years of your work.“  
  
“I know that,” Ruben says, but he doesn’t sound entirely convinced. “I know. Even then…I really don't wanna have to get in touch with him, and they’d want some testimonial. I don’t wanna see his face or hear his voice ever again.”  
  
“Ruben,” says Usnavi. “This is yours and if you say drop it, we won’t say another word about it. But if this is a thing you want to do, we can find a way to make it happen. We’ll…I don't know, contact your old lab so they can pass a message along without you having to speak to him yourself, there has to be a way around it. Hell, I’ll put a fuckin' sweater on and go meet him myself if that’s what it takes, since we apparently look so alike.”

He pokes Vanessa in the arm at that last bit: both he and Ruben find the idea that they’ve got similar features completely incomprehensible, despite how many people notice it.

“You abso-fucking-lutely will not do that,” snaps Ruben. “I mean it. If this is something I decide to do, if I have to get in touch with him, I don’t want either of you anywhere near him, you got that?”

It’s not like him to demand things outright, so of _course_ he only does it now to keep them safe. He’s such an idiot, but Vanessa won’t deny him it. Plus, it’s kind of hot when he’s protective like this.

“We got it,” she says seriously, and Usnavi nods. Ruben scrutinizes both of them for a moment. Apparently satisfied with their sincerity, he drops down to sit back in between them.

“Wait. Am I for real doing this?” he says. “I think I’m doing this. Holy fuck.”

And he bursts into that high, uncontrollable giggle, the one Usnavi tries to pull out of him at any possible occasion. Vanessa knows why: Ruben doesn’t often laugh this freely but when he does it always makes her feel the way she did the night Usnavi announced he was staying in the Heights after all, when they met up alone and he said _we never got round to drinking this yesterday, _holding out a bottle to her. Ruben laughing, and the sight of Usnavi smiling at him with his hand over his mouth like he’s trying to hold off from joining in, is like the cold happy fizz of drinking champagne in Bennet Park at sunset.

She doesn’t tell them this, just interlaces her fingers with Ruben’s and says “a million dollar drug? That must be some good shit.”

Ruben grins at her. “It was. It will be. Sleeping drug, no hangover, exponentially smaller risk of dependency than anything on the market right now. Do you know how many conditions are made so much worse by associated insomnia, or by side-effects from current meds? PTSD, depression, the amount of avenues for potential improvements Blackout could open up for mental health alone, you have no idea. It could change our whole understanding of the way parts of the brain work. It could be amazing. This could be _amazing_.”  
  
Jesus. She knew he was good at his old job, there’s never been any doubt about that, but it’s something else seeing him talk for real about what he can do. Is this how he used to be, back before someone tried to steal all the life and potential from him?

Rubens’s grabbed his notebook back off the coffee table and is scribbling away in tiny, neat handwriting, talking almost as fast as Usnavi usually does. “I mean, there’s a few things I’d want to refine, and I’d have to find a lab that’d take on the-- but that’s no issue, people would be lining up round the block for it. God, imagine what I could do with it if I have a whole team developing it this time! We could change so much-- shit, and I need to call my mom, get her to forward all my research to me.”  
  
He’s already scrolling through his contacts when Usnavi leans over and plucks the phone out of his hand. “Dude, it’s 11 PM. You’re gonna scare the shit out of her if you call her this late.” He sets the phone down on the table and kisses Ruben hard, both hands on his cheeks. “Just enjoy the moment, okay? You can start on your work tomorrow.”  
  
“_My_ work,” Ruben repeats, breaking out into another smile. He glances from Usnavi to Vanessa, and he looks so goddamn proud of himself. “It’s _my_ work. It’s still mine.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments make me extremely happy and encourage me to write more!   
Come say hi to me on [tumblr](https://thisstableground.tumblr.com/)!


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